Archive for July 2015

When I was a child, my mum worked as a childminder for a friend. Once she was annoyed with that friend for something she’d done, and she got back at her by… letting the friend’s younger child have a nap.

I was utterly confused by this. How could letting a tired child sleep be an act of revenge, rather than an act of kindness? (And how do you get revenge on one person by doing something to another person, anyway?)

I categorised it as just one of those things that didn’t make any sense now, but might make sense later. Along with my mum’s fear that her kids might doze off in the car on long journeys. Why did she keep waking us up by clapping her hands? Why wouldn’t she just let us sleep when we were tired and sleepy and there was nothing else to do?

As a young adult, I began to think about it a bit more critically. I formulated the concept of a “politics of sleep” after being seated on a delayed plane next to a grandmother who was trying very hard to get a happy, alert toddler to sleep. She needed him to be asleep for some reason, even though he clearly didn’t need to be asleep. He was interested in his surroundings and his toys. It was the mirror image of the situation where my mum needed me and my siblings to be awake.

The grandmother kept saying “Freddie! Do you want your bot-bot?” to tempt him to drink from the pool of oblivion (well, a plastic bottle which clearly had some kind of sleepy-making substance in it). But he was having too much fun. I couldn’t understand why she was so determined to make him sleep.

Freddie and his bot-bot made it clear to me that when adults try to manage the sleep of the children in their lives, it’s not necessarily about the child’s happiness or welfare. I realised it was about control. But I didn’t understand why for a long, long time.

I didn’t understand, because I didn’t understand that I was work.

My mum was waking us up in the car because she knew that if we snatched some sleep there, we would be fresher in the evening and we would want to stay up later. Waking us up was a pro-sleep, not an anti-sleep action. Or rather, it was about controlling our sleep. Because when we were awake, we were work for her.

When you’re a kid, you don’t get that. And I think it’s kind of a shock when you realise that as a child, your existence constitutes work for someone else. I suppose it’s part of the general shock of realising the world doesn’t revolve around you. You realise that trip to the playground isn’t about you – it’s to give your parents a break from you. That organised activity you do, whether it’s violin lessons or Sunday school or Cubs or whatever – your parents look forward to it as a break. Giving you structured time is as much about giving your parents the luxury of unstructured time as it is about the actual activity you’re doing.

But of course, when you’re hanging out at home, playing with your toys, watching telly, whatever – you think you’re just being. You don’t know you’re being work for someone. I didn’t realise this until I was an adult myself. And I wonder if there are some people who don’t even realise it until they have their own children.

Readers of this blog will know that I’m interested in identifying under-recognised or invisible work. Well, the politics of sleep is at least partly about invisible work. We try to control the sleep of others when we perceive that those other people’s existence constitutes work for us.

I suppose it’s nice that he’s so relaxed about people wandering off with his coffee cups, but that’s not really a definition of owning stuff that I’ve ever heard outside the world of competitive minimalism.

I have over 30 jars of spices in my kitchen. They’re arranged on two spice racks. In other words, a small part of my kitchen contains nearly 35 things, which is nearly half of the total possessions of the two people who claim only to own 72 things. Compared to them I am a hoarder, a compulsive accumulator of things, a stuff-glutton.

But the thing is, all those spices have been used in the past year. Most of them have been used in the past six months. Should I jettison them in the cause of minimalism and then cook bland food for the rest of my life? Or should I cleverly declare that 30+ spices plus two spice racks actually counts as “one thing”, just like an iPhone and headphones? Or maybe I should claim I don’t really own the spices, because they’re not resellable. But the thing is…what would I actually gain from any of this? Real question: what do the people who do this gain from it?

Obviously, minimalists will talk about simplicity and about rejecting consumerism and about streamlining their lives to focus on what’s truly important. But minimalism is aspirational not just because it represents these choices, but because it correlates with privilege.

When rich people present the idea that they’ve learned to live lightly as a paradoxical insight, they have the idea of wealth backwards. You can only have that kind of lightness through wealth.

It’s really worth reading the whole thing. I linked to it in my post about the hidden baggage of people who are always travelling, and I’ll make the same point again that I made there: we need to stop using visuals to assess what impact someone’s life is having. If your living space is constantly immaculate and empty-looking, are you being responsible in how you get rid of things? Do you go the extra mile to work out what the council will recycle? Do you try to repair broken things? Do you ever store items for friends? Do you allow those friends to crash on your sofa?

But that’s not even my actual point here. My point here is that that kind of “lightness” and “independence” is heavily dependent on existing structures and networks. It’s dependent on civilisation. Your passport, your Oyster card, your credit card: all light objects that depend on strong invisible networks to be of any use whatsoever. It’s great that something fitting in your jeans pocket can (literally) open doors for you. Just don’t forget that when you blip a turnstile open with your Oyster card, you are benefiting from the ideas and hard work and goodwill of thousands of other people.

When we talk about complex supply chains, it’s often in the context of terrible hidden costs for things like iPhones. But making use of things that wouldn’t exist without complex systems isn’t necessarily bad. It can be morally neutral or morally the better choice. It’s just part of signing up for human civilisation. And the more you strive for possession-free simplicity in your own life, the more dependent you become on that civilisation.

The decision to have no permanent address depends on the existence of hotels, other people’s homes, B&Bs. It depends on you having money. It depends on people’s willingness to accept that money in exchange for accommodation. Likewise the decision to have no cooking utensils, or whatever.

I rummaged through the debris scattered around the cabin floor and the surrounding land, finding remnants of life in the cabin before the siege. I picked things up – cardboard boxes containing some empty spice bottles her mother used to keep, Elisheba’s baby chair.

“What are you doing?” said Rachel. “It’s just a bunch of junk.” She laughed. “All the things that used to be important to us were junk to other people,” she said. “The books and stuff. Now it’s junk to me and important to you.”

Jon Ronson’s book THEM sets up a tension between two American ways of living. Maybe it’s reasonable, educated people versus paranoid, racist gun nuts. Maybe it’s a secretive global elite versus courageous ordinary people. You could see the division as being about class, religion, level of education, politics. But maybe it’s also about stuff.

The backstory to that quote above: when Rachel was a child, her family lived in a mountain cabin, which ended up being the location of a siege in which her mother, brother and dog were killed.

There were US marshals and FBI snipers in gas masks and face paint and camouflage, local police, state police, the BATF, the Internal Revenue Service, the US Border Patrol, Highway Patrol from four states, City Police and the Forestry Service. They had tanks and armoured personnel carriers.

If all those supposedly separate authorities ganged up to collude in the senseless murder of your family members, how much would you believe in the power of networks, communication, goodwill, civilisation generally, to keep you safe? If you’d spent eight days trapped inside your home, would you be relaxed about relying on takeaways and meals out, or would you stock up on food? If the authorities had tricked your father into committing a crime and then tried to kill him, would you rely on the police for help in emergencies or would you buy a gun?

If you don’t believe you can rely on the things that many of us take for granted, you will stock up on food and water. You’ll ramp up the security of your home, maybe with cameras and alarms, maybe with a guard dog or weapons. You’ll drive a car instead of using public transport, and probably choose the kind of car that can be driven off-road. And you won’t throw out useful things just because they’re not useful to you right now – you’ll keep them just in case.

In other words, being prepared for the worst makes you the threat. Opting for stuff over systems makes you the threat. Why? My only guess right now is that this civilisation we all depend on is a fragile thing, and it depends on the majority of people buying in to it. The same with respect for the authorities. So the US government wants to discourage people from behaving as if they can’t trust the state or their neighbours, in case it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Safety is an anti-gift.

But of course, in reality, only certain people will ever be prosecuted under the “too many groceries” law or the “well, flashlights are always useful in a power cut, let’s get some” law. We’re back to privilege again.

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